Case Study 40: "The Frozen Moon"

"It's dreamy weather we're on
You waved your crooked wand
Along an icy pond with a frozen moon
A murder of silhouette crows I saw
And the tears on my face
And the skates on the pond
They spell Alice."

-Tom Waits

They say a picture's worth a thousand words.  Memory is bland without a sense of smell. But for me, there is no sense stronger than sound.  

Sound spurs a mood, creates a moment, and inspires creativity.  I still own nearly every mixtape, cd, playlist I've ever made, and there must be hundreds.  Because these veritable life diaries hold a power, beyond sight or smell, to take me back somewhere.

"The Frozen Moon" is a vanilla cupcake with frosty blue vanilla buttercream. Simple at it's best, it is topped with traces of snow sprinkles and evokes the enchanting cold stillness of winter.

Senior year of High School. I'm ready to graduate, and it's more than evident by the miles I've put on my Jeep. December and an early college acceptance roll by, and I hit the back-roads, where the air is crisp and my car knows just where to go.  My cds all begin with the same dreamy song by Air, and have titles like "Driving Around with the Moonroof Open on a Cold Night." But there was one song that captured what I was searching for: "Alice" by Tom Waits.  

Sounds, subtle yet powerful, set the scene. A metronome of tick-tocking piano notes hold visions of lustful clock-watching. It's brooding, the horns are haunting, and his voice is full of smoke.  My destination is certainly not a place, but an emotion as lyrics speaks of icy ponds, dark silhouettes, and forbidden love.  So I drive on, up Route 57 and past the snow-filled fields and motionless tree skeletons that hang against a frozen moon.

Since words just won't do it justice, I'll let Tom tell the rest...

Case Study 39: "Untitled (The Nightmare Before Christmas)"

"The moon that hung over the new-fallen snow
Cast an eerie pall over the city below,
And Santa Claus's laughter now sounded like groans,
And the jingling bells like chattering bones..."

Every year, around this time, I go into production. My house becomes a veritable mess, filled with sugars, yarns, glitter and flannels, serving as a sort of secret fortress of kitsch in which I am driven bring the ideas that enter my mind to life.  Tim Burton once said "one person's craziness is another person's reality," a mere afterthought for a sort of mad scientist who makes doodled imagination-gone-wild come to life.  A daydreaming boy of tragic toys turned dissatisfied Disney animator, Burton took to the pen, the brush, and the camera to make his inspired and satirical views a reality.  Extramarital affairs with machines and crustaceans spawned Robot and Oyster boys; a Voodoo girl was fated for loneliness less each heartbreak puncture her core deeper.  And a forelorn skeleton, seeing the light on the other side, haphazardly tried to bring a little Christmas heart to spooks of Halloweentown.    

"Untitled (The Nightmare Before Christmas)" is a red velvet cupcake with cream cheese buttercream and twisted black buttercream swirls.  Dreamed up, sketched out, and Burtonesque at its best, it's jagged, imperfect, and topped with madness.

It's Christmas Eve, 1994. After hours of "seven fish"-feasting , fireside tumbling, and spritzer cookie sneaking, my cousins returned home to their own sleepy little Connecticut town.  We'd creep into our rooms and turn down our beds to reveal mysterious new flannel sheets.  Tucking in, the candles in our windows still sparkled behind the blinds, blinking a sort of morse code to the North Pole that this house was indeed a worthy stop. 

But sleeping never lasted long. I would spring awake, at 2 or 3 am, engulfed by darkness, to noises on the rooftop.  I was instantly scared, certain that amidst the snow drifts were Santa's reindeer parallel parking above my head, yet intrigued by a potential sighting of the man in red himself. But weary in my 10-year old bones, I faded back to sleep before giving it an afterthought.  

Though I'll never know who it really was caught in those icy swirls above, I can only trust that as the mysticism of Christmas whirled around me, my imagination around the holiday ran savage.  With craziness as my reality, the season will always inspire me to pull from my twisted dreams and create.  After all, a Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good fright...

To be inspired yourself, check out Tim Burton's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art until April 26, 2009 in New York City.

Case Study 38: "The Royal Tannenbaum"

"Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow."

-Robert Frost

For me, the Christmas season never kicked off with pre-Thanksgiving radio repeats or the mingling of Halloween candies with the candy canes in the drugstore aisles. No, for me it always began with a car trip.  We'd bundle up in flannels and down jackets, as Christmases were colder then, and stock the trunk with twine and bungees, an extra saw, and a pocketful of profanities.  After warming our hands by the barrel fires, we'd grab hot ciders for the journey, and set out to farm, with the most glorious un-Charlie Brown fir as our harvest's hope.

"The Royal Tannenbaum" is a light chocolate cupcake with peppermint buttercream branches and pines. Decked out with the finest silver dragées and fresh snowflakes all best trees deserve, it is crowned by a glorious sugar cookie star.

Running past those boring balsams, we'd dash further across the scotch pines, and after hundreds of thousands of kid-measured miles, in the deep heart of the seemingly abandoned woods, we'd find it.   Our royal tannenbaum.  We'd measure it against my brother's ever-changing height, lay down the blanket, and saw. And saw. And after slinging those reserved profanities, and sawing some more, with one glorious crack it would be ours.

Ours to drag back to the car as the sun started to fade into what I  was certain could be Aurora Borealis.  Ours to dig our fingers into, keeping safe grips on our precious catch, as the cold winter's air snuck in the open car window. And ours to bring the first sign of those lovely dark and deep winter Christmas woods into our home.

What's been cooking in Cupcaketology besides confections...

We interrupt this cupcakecast to report that life catches up with you sometimes.

A transatlantic trip, letting go of a loved one, a tennis tournament and a full-fledged arms-flailing launch into holiday season has had the Cupcaketologist running head first away from November.

Luckily, time passes, months end, and the most wonderful time of the year arrives. Just wanted to let you know that besides cupcakes, something sassy's been brewing in the Cupcaketologist's kitchen.

By demand, I set up a little shop on Etsy to feature the tartan knit stoles ("Tartan Hugs" as they've been deemed!) that I've been furiously whipping up in the past weeks.  In true swinging Betty Draper-style, the handmade stoles are reversible (knit on one side, plaid on the other), faux fur trimmed, custom made to order...  and oh so warm! 

Tartan Hugs by the Cupcaketologist

We will resume normal cupcaking operations this weekend... 

Case Study 37: "The David Bowie"

"Don't let me hear you say life's taking you nowhere, angel. Come get up my baby.  Look at that sky, life's begun, nights are warm and the days are young." - David Bowie

Ziggy Stardust Bowie.  Labyrinth Bowie.  Freaky dream Bowie.   Heteropoda DavidBowie. A man of innovation, sheer glamour, and reinvention, Bowie reminded us to dream, while never losing sight of who we really were.  
 
"The David Bowie" is a fun-kyfetti vanilla cupcake filled with jimmies and topped flaming red vanilla buttercream, glam rocks, stardust and a spider from Mars. Half imagination, half bizarre, it's a cake oddity of Bowie mysticism in a Weird and Gilly confection.

This Halloween, I'll don my best silver lame', Aladdin Sane face, and whip out air guitar windmill riffs.  Like a cat from Japan, I'll rebel rebel and find modern love.  And I'll do it like Bowie did best...with striking visuals and in search of my very own golden years.

Case Study 36: "The Impassioned Pistachio"

I'm finally going back to Italy.

Last week, I found a mixtape I made from four years ago, before I arrived at the airport, bound for a year on the boot. I popped it in, and got to thinking about the twenty year-old me.

Life in Italy brought isolation. Two weeks to find an apartment with two years of worthless classroom Italian made for quite the search. It also brought adventure. I rode through the cobbled streets in the backseat of Fiats faster that I ever imagined, and made eyes at the my local bar's handsome cameriere, prosecco in hand by candlelight and listening to Tolga Trio play Django Reinhardt's classics.  I was full of dreams more colorful than the frescoed ceilings in my Via Zamboni classrooms, and I swear I once reached nirvana on a warm black stone beach in the Aeolian Islands.  I threw myself into anything, just for the experience.  I learned from everything.

"The Impassioned Pistachio" is a pistachio cupcake with a vanilla bean buttercream, crumbled pistachios and a maraschino cherry on top.  Made with Delitia butter, it's full of that earthy terroir only made from the Parma and the Reggio Emilia cows, and a delicate nutty warmth.
  
As I approach my 25th birthday celebration in Bologna, the city where I lived, I think of how that year changed me.  I'm no longer the girl who came home after a month at college, arms flailing as I passionately tried to convince my parents that Gumboot dancing with the children in South Africa was my true life calling.  I'm also not the new college graduate, entering a different kind of "real world," full of wild hope and cocktail dreams. 

Someone once told me that your late twenties are a little more calm, a little less "rollercoaster ride."  Five years ago, that seemed ludicrous to me, and I snarkily replied, "where's the fun in that?"  But as I approach them, a few years of recklessness, a couple of heartaches and some spontaneous wandering behind me, I finally get what she meant.  Though I feel just like that wide-eyed twenty year old, ready to launch into flight back across the pond, somehow, I feel more grounded than ever.   

Notes from the Field: Ethnographic Studies in Cupcaketology

While anthropology aims to look outward to understand what's inside, to truly grasp the essence of, well, our "humanness", sometimes we need to spend more time. Anthropologists use ethnography, a holistic experience-based study, to understand culture in this truest context.

Drumroll please...

The Cupcaketologist is launching an set of ethnographic and collaborative case reports - a true study in friendship, life history, and shared kitchen chaos, freshly baked from the ovens of friends, families, and more.

Because who better to help us understand ourselves than the people that we share our lives with...


Photo: Margaret Mead, Samoa. (via)

Case Study 35: "The Enchanted Pumpkin"

Shakespeare famously warned, "'Tis now the very witching time of night, when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world." The autumn season holds more than just apple cider and falling leaves, for at its heart is the most frightful of holidays. Before candy corn began hitting stores in August, and every costume was a naughty one, I always found a sort of romantic and sad madness in the Halloween season. That rather than be about gore and fishnets, what lies within is truly about bewitchment and mystery. It's what is unseen and then assumed in the stolen glances and enchanting moments that brew the magic.

"The Enchanted Pumpkin" is a light pumpkin cupcake with a maple cream cheese buttercream encrusted in toasted pecans and topped with a cinnamon frosting.

It's the haunting face of the jack-o-lantern as the fire turns his flesh inside out. The silhouette of a black bird perched on a freshly bare branch against the crooked icy moon. It's the slightly unnerving feeling that for one night in the world someplace in time, things were not quite as they seemed.

Dusty Springfield - Spooky - Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

Case Study 34: "The Cookie Crumble"

"Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together."- Marilyn Monroe

Like most kids in the kitchen, I started out a cookie baker- I think it was just in my blood. A true Italian bambino, I teethed on unfrosted anginetti cookies and as I got older, I naturally dunked anise biscotti into coffee for breakfast. But I made my personal foray into baking with chocolate chip cookies. Perfecting my recipe meant altering it constantly, which seemed to happen naturally as I got older and life changed more frequently. The cookies were no longer basic. They contained four types of smashed chocolate, coconut, and occasionally "everything but the kitchen sink."

And then one day, I just lost it. My cookies stopped turning out as I wanted, and as it goes, I stopped turning them out.

"The Cookie Crumble" is a vanilla cupcake with a cookie dough center, brown sugar buttercream frosting and chocolate chip cookie star on top. Through all of its grandiose interpretations, its deconstruction, and its rebirth, the noveau chocolate chip cookie is merely a simple one again. Good butter, chocolate, and a little sea salt on top. Because like life itself, no matter how many changes it goes through- the loves, the losses, the successes, and the moves- what is most basic and natural comes out on top in the end.

And that's just how the cookie crumbles.

Case Study 33: "The Back to School Special"

Nostalgic. That's how I feel every year when September fades away. Unlike the warm embrace of the summer wind, one fall breeze whips in and my body remembers it- the way it feels as the earth moves closer to its farthest tilted axis on an eternal trip around the sun. And September's end always held the inevitable for me: the bonfires and football games, the earthy smell of a freshly sharpened Ticonderoga No. 2 and the frantic scramble to enjoy the dwindling sunlight hours before the New England grayness set in.

"The Back to School Special" is a scholastic-inspired trio of cupcakes that are dedicated to the first day of school jitters, the tire swing and monkey bar playgrounds, and the brown-bagged lunchroom antics.

The "PB&J" is a peanut butter cupcake filled with strawberry jam and topped with a strawberry jelly buttercream and toasted peanuts. Before the era of widespread peanut/gluten allergies and political correctness, the basic Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich was a staple in the diet every elementary school child, recording the lifelong marriage of "fruit and nut" in the Bible of Good American Eatin'.
"The S'more" is a chocolate cupcake atop a graham cracker crust with a Hershey's chocolate buttercream and toasted marshmallow on top. Whether you toasted "shmallows" on a backwood camping trip or melted your chocolate at a Homecoming bonfire, S'mores told us Americans that there's magic in good old processed cookies, candy, and fire. Combined or separate.
And lastly, "The Idyllic Apple" . Regardless of if you ate an "apple a day" or you were a "hot for teacher" apple-polisher, the apple has long been a reminder of brown-nosing scholarly excellence, and a true emblem for back-to-school memories.

They say that your sense of smell is the strongest in evoking memories, but with the change of seasons, I beg to differ. Though the first smell of musty rain can signal the start of spring, it's the feel that winter is creeping in and the tastes of my schoolgirl lunches that tell me it's not far off. Those days of playground flirtation and soccer games may be long gone, but that stubborn old autumn wind just brings me back every year...

Case Study 32: "The Turkish Fig"

"My name is Turkish. Funny name for an Englishman. I know." - Snatch

Wine, music, cupcakes.

For us, tunes, food, and wandering reigned supreme. Driving around aimlessly for hours, we had warded our teenage angst off by roving the woods for cliffs to jump off and watching the stars by the Redding reservoir. We stood in the 3 am moonlight of the tall grass field next to his once-childhood home and spent one Valentine's Day eating homemade chocolate cookies in a parking lot, windows down and Snatch soundtrack blaring The Stranglers. They say first loves are never really over.

"The Turkish Fig" is a fig cupcake with a walnut encrusted honey frosting and vanilla buttercream on top. It's drizzled in honey and sugar crystals. There's a natural sweetness brought by the earthiness of the fig, and warmed by the local honey, a reminder that best and most familiar things always come from places closest to our hearts. Some things are just better when baked by two.

Most of us fall young and hard for our firsts, promising a lifetime of longing, with those moments of uncertainty, discovery, and anguish playing like movies in our memories. Though this might be true for many, I'm lucky to know that I've gotten to keep mine for always as living reminder of my youth and a truly wonderful friend.

Case Study 31: "The Velvet Collection"

Fashion Week has arrived in New York, and it's inescapable. As the madness at the tents ensues, I sit here in quiet rainy Philadelphia, snuggled with magazines and blogs. I'm downright inspired by the classic fabulosity, the innovation, and the outrageousness that is fashion today. And so, the sartorial sophisticate Cupcaketologist brings you: "The Velvet Collection."


"The Orange Crush" is an orange velvet cupcake with lemon buttercream and yellow crystals. Preen and Vena Cava both showcased pops of orange this week so far for Spring, and St. Vincent opened Rachel Comey's show in a refreshing reminder that summer is not quite over.

"The Russian Doll" is a purple velvet cupcake topped with a black raspberry buttercream and encrusted in flaked sugar crystals. It's inspired by the rogue elegance of Freha's spread in September's Vogue UK and the decadence of autumnal jewel tones and velvet against the backdrop of brilliant stones and clutter.


"The Mademoiselle" is a pink velvet cupcake topped with a vanilla buttercream coiffe and pearls. It is reminiscent of the black and white, and yes, pink of Chanel. Karl Lagerfield and Lara Stone have been making sweet music together lately, and to that marriage I raise my glass and say, Santé!

Case Study 30: "The Idyllic Apple"

For better or for worse, I had a painfully romantic childhood. My parents had met young and left home early, growing up together and creating the life they always imagined. Dreamers beget dreamers, of course, and when we settled on the tiny border of New England and Westchester, it was the perfect pastoral backdrop to host my wanderlust.
Summer reigned supreme for my aqueous adventures, but it was autumn that held my heart. Leaves turned slowly here, and the Housatonic and Hudson Valleys were glorious seas of golds, reds, and oranges for months. We were apple pickers, perfect pumpkin seekers, and fall vegetable roasters. And there were Friday nights when I'd rather sit near the fireplace and watch my parents dance eyes-closed to Elvis Costello's "Toledo" with wineglasses in hand than be anywhere else in the world.

The Idyllic Apple is an apple pecan cupcake with a vanilla-nutmeg cream cheese buttercream and cinnamon sugar sprinkled atop. It's reminiscent of the orchards we still travel to every year and the cider donuts that never make it past the car.

I have this memory of driving in our first Jeep years ago, top down in early October, my brother and I are in the back. Django Reinhardt is playing gypsy jazz and I am facing back as we drive through Westchester roads past churches converted into homes and pastures. We walked rows of a vineyard in wool sweaters, chased a surprised pheasant and watched as the sun squeaked the last golden light of the Indian Summer.

I always wonder if it ruined me, to look back so fondly on these years and question if I'll have it as good someday. And then I remember who I come from, and I already do.

Recipe:
The Idyllic Apple (Adapted from my mother's Och's Orchard Apple Cake, 1976), makes 1 dozen cupcakes

1 c. flour
1 tsp. baking soda
3/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. salt
1 c. sugar
1/4 c. butter
1 egg
2-3 apples, minced
1 cup nuts (pecans or walnuts), chopped finely

1. Set the oven at 350º and line a one-dozen cupcake pan, sift together the flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt.
2. Cream the sugar and butter together in a bowl until combined and fluffy, roughly 3 minutes.
3. Add the egg and mix until combined.
4. Blend in the apples. Add the dry ingredients in 3 parts until combined and fold in the nuts.
5. Fill the cupcake pan and bake 20-22 minutes, cupcakes will be dark brown.

Vanilla Nutmeg Cream Cheese Buttercream

1 c. butter
1/2 c. cream cheese
1 tsp. vanilla
1 pinch freshly grated nutmeg
4-5 cups confectioner's sugar

1. Combine the butter and cream cheese with a mixer on a medium speed, 3 minutes.
2. Mix in the vanilla and nutmeg.
3. Gradually blend in the confectioner's sugar. If it becomes to dense, cut with 1-2 tsp. milk.
4. Frost cupcakes generously, and enjoy with fond thoughts of autumn.